Rooted Trees

Hi.

I'm having trouble with this 'show' this question.

Show that any rooted tree with at least two vertices contains a non-terminal
vertex such that all of its children are terminal vertices.

I can see why this is the case visually. Quite logical in fact. How do I show that the children of the two vertices are actually terminal vertices. Drawing it out is a piece of cake, but showing it in words... its a different story!!

For example, take an arbitrary rooted tree with at least two vertices. You need to show that there exists at least 1 non-terminal vertex with said property. So for contradiction, you can assume that there is NO such vertex, i.e. there isn't any non-terminal vertex, all of whose children are terminal. An equivalent statement is: for each non-terminal vertex, one or more children are non-terminal. From this, I think, you can get a contradiction very easily.

Take a terminal node t with maximal distance to the root. The maximal distance must be finite, because the tree is finite. Since there are at least 2 nodes, t can't be the root itself, so it has a parent p. p has the property you're looking for.